


Flashes Before Your Eyes

by Uakari



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-22
Updated: 2013-11-22
Packaged: 2018-01-02 09:25:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1055144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Uakari/pseuds/Uakari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These are the trivial thoughts of small men, unfit for a position of leadership.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flashes Before Your Eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [splashfree](https://archiveofourown.org/users/splashfree/gifts).



> For my dear Splashfree, who wrote me such a lovely fic in The Law of Levi that I just had to write something for them in return!

Some idiot once said that in the moments before a man dies, scenes from his life play out before his eyes as a sort of final, macabre reminder of all the things he has accomplished or, in some cases, failed to accomplish. Levi has never been sure whether this is supposed to be comforting or terrifying or both, but he does know that it is – in no uncertain terms – _a load of fucking bullshit_. He’s watched countless men and women pass from this world to the next, and not a single one of them has suggested this might be true. No one has confused his face with their best friend Brian’s from when they were six, or called for their beloved pet Moopsy Bear who’s been dead these seven years. They’ve all been quite clear on where they are, what they’re doing. Which of their limbs are missing.

Every single one.

What’s more likely, at least in Levi’s estimation, is that some poor, confused bastard who’s never seen death - never talked to him, never had to stare in his foggy, gray eyes while he mumbles his last words - mistakes a perfectly normal moment of panic for a near-death experience and goes around shooting his mouth off to anyone who’ll listen about the wild flashbacks he had. He feels the moment his gut grinds to a staggering halt to shunt energy to his muscle tissues as if he’s been struck, convinces himself that he’s about to puke up the heart he’s sure he can feel edging up his throat. His body is shutting down – _he fucking knows this! he's sure of it!_ – and in a few minutes it will all be over. Just as soon as his mind stops racing with all the adrenaline that’s being pumped into it; as soon as all these regrets and triumphs and nearest exit routes stop flashing before his eyes.

It’s probably an easy mistake to make, for a beginner. 

Levi, on the other hand, is anything but a beginner. He hesitates to call himself an expert – because that’s distressing even _to_ experts – but he’s done near-death enough times to know that the lump in his throat and twisting in his gut mean he can run that much faster, jump that much higher, and generally get the fuck away better from whatever is about to bring about his immediate and probably messy demise. Usually a titan, occasionally a human (though those days are largely – hopefully – in the past).

He’s also no stranger to panic, even if he will never speak this out loud.

It’s a strange emotion (if it can be called that – maybe “reaction” is more apropos) and one that he’s never been comfortable with, if only for the implications it carries along with it. If he panics for his life, does it mean he holds himself above his comrades? If he panics for their lives, does it mean he holds them in higher regard than their objective? Does it mean he’s broken some rule, crossed some unspoken boundary that makes him unfit to lead?

Does it mean he holds the life of one person more important than the future of humanity?

* * *

“These are the trivial thoughts of small men, unfit for a position of leadership,” she says, fussing with the frills on his cravat. It’s six am on a Monday, she’s kneeling in his rumpled bed sheets wearing only an ill-fitting white button-up, and staring at him with the sort of half-lidded eyes that might be sexy on anyone else, but on her scream that she’s been puttering in her dungeon until the wee hours and only skipped up here for a quick shag before he has to report for duty. Definitely not someone that ought to be taken seriously, especially where she’s spouting platitudes like this rubbish.

“Why is it always about size with you?” he grumbles, pushing her head back toward the mattress. He yanks at the cravat to loosen the knots she’s tied with her eyes half open and her brain half asleep. It’s like she’s tried to choke him with his own uniform-

“Leave it puffed,” she gurgles sleepily, “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

“What is?” he pauses, wondering what the hell she’s on about now.

“The tie. Makes your chest look bigger, right?”

“It’s…” he trails off to a rattle in his throat, “No, it’s not.”

“You’re so worried about people taking you seriously.” She’s smiling. _Why is she smiling?_

“Fuck off,” he says, after a moment’s consideration.

“I’m just sayin’,” she mumbles, still grinning like an idiot.

“You’re not saying,” he corrects, “You’re babbling. Probably deliriously, because you haven’t bothered to sleep again tonight.” He grabs his trousers and pulls them on, wonders what the hell he’s done with his harness this time.

“Sleep is for the weak,” she laughs into the pillows, “Besides, you didn’t seem too upset before.”

“You didn’t seem as stupid tired before.” He smashes one of the pillows into her face and catches a glimpse of his harness tucked back between the mattress and headboard. He doesn’t want to think about how it got there, but he’s sure it’s her fault. He holds the pillow in place and digs it free as her complaints are swallowed into the down. “Did you even remember to eat yesterday?” he asks once it’s free and he no longer feels the need to smother her.

“I ate…” she trials off, eyes darting to the upper rim of their sockets as she thinks – apparently _very hard_ – about her last meal. “Yeah, I had breakfast,” she says at last, “It was pancakes, but they were shitty because Aurou was working the mess hall. Kick his ass for that, would you?”

He pulls the belts tight around his knees and dutifully pretends to ignore her. The thigh belts are as finicky as always, but he manages to fasten them without pinching anything…important. Around his waist, up his sides-

“Are you worried about me?” she rolls into his side and gnaws at his hip.

“Only that you’re becoming a cannibal,” he says, scooting away from her. There’s no point really – she follows him like a homing pigeon and it's mere seconds before he feels her hot breath eeking through the weave of his trousers. “Would you fucking stop?”

“But you are tasty,” she whines, “And vulnerable-”

He snatches a pillow to mash back down over her face again. “You’re an idiot.” She thrashes against him for a few seconds, then goes limp in an overly dramatic display of deadness that he’s seen far too many times to take seriously. He lets the pillow up and smacks it across her ass. “You sleeping here today?”

“Mmm,” she hums happily, “I’ll make your bed when I’m done.”

“Make sure you do,” he gets to his feet, regretting that the mattress doesn’t spring back more in his absence to really counter her ‘small man’ quips. Alas, he _is_ a small man, and probably unfit to lead, just as she’s said. A small man with a puffy cravat to make his chest look bigger and-

“Levi,” she tugs at his thigh belts.

“Hmm?” He moves to peel her fingers away, but somehow ends up having his fingers squeezed in a way that he’s sure she means to be reassuring, but seems more humiliating than anything in the moment. Still, he squeezes back. In a big, manly sort of way.

“Everyone worries about things like that,” she says very seriously, “We’d all rather have live squads than victory in the moment, if we’re honest. It’s just…”

“Just what?” he presses. It looks for all intents and purposes as if she’s drifted off to sleep mid-sentence, and this is exactly the kind of open-ended statement that’s likely to keep him aggravated all day.

“We have amazing brains,” she continues, eyes still closed, “Capable of all sorts of cognitive dissonance and moral ambiguity. We want to win, but we don’t want to pay the price. We continue to pay the price anyway, even though it kills us bit by bit. You’re thinking it’s a weakness, but I…” She trails off again, inhaling deeply.

“You?”

“Yeah, I,” she yawns, “I just think it’s normal. People talk a lot about the ends justifying the means, but I think that’s a load of bullshit. You can justify anything you want to with the right amount of mental gymnastics. It’s why people like religion and hard and fast definitions of things. If you try to think things through, attack them from all angles, you just end up tying yourself in knots. Even Erwin talks about throwing away your humanity, but something like this is really just embracing it. What the fuck is humanity anyway?”

“You’re making less sense the longer you talk,” he sighs.

“I’m just saying you’re fine and normal and not at all small.”

“It’s always about size with you,” he grumbles and heads for the door.

* * *

She makes more sense than he lets on, of course, but it’s always good to keep a retort or two handy when dealing with a dual-function word and information generator. So maybe it’s normal and human to hold six contrary opinions at once. Maybe it’s normal and human to panic for the lives of your comrades. That doesn’t make it a virtue under fire (or under teeth, as the situation so often is), nor does it make it okay that he-

It’s too early in the afternoon to start indulging that line of thought.

He flips the stack of mostly empty papers face down on his desk. This is a piss poor move, he knows – the ink from the top page isn’t dry and is going to leave a fantastic smear across his desk and wreck the finish – but the thought of continuing is even less palatable than scraping congealed ink from oaken divots. He’s tired of listing fallen squad members and tired of conjuring up excuses why their practiced battle formations didn’t hold or why so-and-so was so easily picked off the line. He doesn’t care to describe the three separate abnormal types they ran into this time out – in fact, he’s sure there is someone who can do it much more thoroughly and with far more gusto than himself. Erwin can fucking take a number and wait behind the long line of shit he has to worry about before he finishes this report.

He stomps over to the window and drums his fingers against the sill, scowling all the while at the massive amount of bullshit that he’s managing to feed even himself about this whole affair. It’s easy to list names. It’s easier still to describe a stupid fucking titan crawling like a toddler across the ground. 

He’s just an idiot. Like whoever came up with that life flashing before your eyes bullshit.

He stares out the window at the courtyard. He’s two stories up, so he can’t make out the exact features of the titan tied up, yoked, and pinned into place below, but from the dusty blond hair he can tell it’s the four meter class they captured the week before. Sonny, or Sawney or whatever. It doesn’t matter – he’s still going to call them Bitey and Dumbfuck. Or Bigfoot and Nommy. Fang and Sharptooth. It doesn’t really matter, as long as she rolls her eyes and he gets a snicker out of it.

Anything to play down the fact that she is going to fucking die at their hands.

Mouths.

Whatever.

She’s standing in the courtyard as well, armed with a sharpened three meter pole and a legion of underlings at her command. She walks with all the swagger of a woman with her enemy pinned and an army at her back, but in the end, this doesn’t really matter if she sticks her hand or her leg or her head too far forward and the damned thing bites them off. And she will, because that’s what she does, and there is no stopping her. Even that lieutenant of hers, who sticks himself to her like glue, can’t hold back the barrage of idiot need-to-touch that comes over her in moments like these. She’d braid their hair if she could. 

For now though, she’s seemingly content to poke at it with the stick. He turns away from the window, breathes a sigh of relief.

Then the shouting begins and his gut twists anew.

* * *

“Erwin’s finally agreed!” she chirps, slamming her food tray down on the table opposite him and flinging herself into an empty seat.

“To have your head examined?” Levi wonders, shielding his plate from the splash-over of potatoes that flies free of hers.

“No, to bring in live titans!” She grins at him maniacally, with tight lips and bared teeth. It’s an expression that would look horrifying on anyone else, but for some unknown reason has begun looking dramatic and suave on her. He swallows this appraisal down in favor of something more characteristic. 

“Did you beat that out of him, or just annoy him to the point of caving?”

She flings a spoonful of potatoes at his face. “Sexual favors, actually,” she sneers, “I’ll be heading back to his quarters after dinner. He needs me.”

“Is he a small man too?”

She waggles her pinky at him and reaches across the table to wipe the potatoes from his nose. “Big only in his generosity,” she says, “I cannot believe I’m finally going to get my hands on them.” She drums her fingers together excitedly and grins even wider. “Do you have any idea? I just…just…ehehehbwahahahaHEHEHEEE-”

“Alright, that’s enough,” he wads his napkin into a ball and flings it at her face, “How are you going to manage to get them alive? And what are you going to do with them once you have them?”

“That won’t be hard!” she insists, “We’ve got the rope cannons and nets to take them, and once there here I was thinking we could yoke them like oxen and tack them into the ground-”

“Tack them how?”

“With big…tacks! It can’t be that hard to smith them, can it?”

“You’re crazy.”

“I am not! I’ll draw up a schematic and take it down to the smithy tomorrow. They can always make it better.”

“Mm.”

“Why are you being such a shit stain about this?” she asks, expression finally fading to something other than ‘crazed,’ “Do you have any idea what I could learn from this? What we could learn? If we could find a weakness, figure out how they hunt, if they smell, if they see color, if they can talk-”

“I know,” he cuts her off. Because he _does_ know. All too well. He’s known for a long time – ever since they first discussed it and she rattled off a million hypotheticals that no one would ever be able to answer without direct testing. And he knows exactly what these discoveries might mean for their cause, might mean for his own goals. Victory, freedom, an end to this terror and subjugation.

All of the things he had joined to Scouting Legion to accomplish and yet-

“You’re picturing me with my head bitten off right now, aren’t you?”

He shakes the image away. “Only because you brought it up,” he lies. He tears a piece from his bread, stuffs his mouth full, and concentrates very hard on the act of chewing. This is possibly one of the worst things he could choose to do, however, as all he sees now – as his teeth pulverize the crusty bits and transform the tender innards into mush – is her grinning, stupid face across the table, harness-free and stripped of all weaponry. He swallows thickly and stares at the wall.

“You’ll be helping me, of course,” she says matter-of-factly, “At least for a day, since your squad is in charge of recon during this next expedition and I’m sure there are about sixteen different reports that will need your signature.”

“Fuck the reports,” he sniffs, “I’ll be there to help.”

* * *

Fuck the reports, indeed. In the end, they could only be fucked for just so long until Erwin got sore and demanded he withdraw immediately to finish them off.

“Tche,” he scoffs at the pile of papers on his desk. There’s nothing for it – he’ll have to finish them today. He’ll work into the late night if he has to, close his drapes and lock his door to wall himself off from the world.

Two stories below, she narrow avoids losing an arm to snapping teeth. He clenches his fist and swallows down the lump in his throat.

* * *

He’s going to kill her.

If he could muster half as much luck off the battlefield as he managed on it, he might be finding himself in a less compromising position. Of course, if he could muster half as much tenacity in dealing with this one stupid woman as he managed with the rest of his squad, this particular position wouldn’t be feasible in the first place.

“Swing him a bit to the left, Mike. There’s no way he’s got a proper view down the gulley from there-”

“So help me, if you swing me any closer to this thing’s ass crack, I will flay you and wear your skin while I feed the rest of you to it, piece by piece.”

Scratch that, the tenacity is there. The disconnect lies entirely between his words (“Fuck the reports,” etc.) and her interpretation of them (“please use my services in the most vile way possible”). He knows that they often operate on very separate planes, has known this for as long as he’s known her. He’s not certain, however, that the differences between these planes have ever been thrown into quite as sharp of relief as they are right now. Especially now as hangs – helpless and limp as a ragdoll – from his 3D maneuver wires, wobbling from side to side as Mike adjusts the tension on each, and stares down the (assumedly) business-free end of a titan.

(The business end of the things is bad enough. It’s sharp, uncomfortably moist, and smells only slightly better than the kitchen compost after a week of fish dinners. Apart from all that, though, it is – at the very least – predictable. There’s a very strong correlation between distance-to-teeth and the probability of losing a limb that doesn’t seem likely to diminish with the passage of time or even the introduction of variables like grappling hooks and dischargeable blades. From this angle, though, _from this angle…_ )

The notion that the titans lack digestive tracts was largely inspired by the half-chewed boluses of heads and limbs and shredding clothing they left scattered across the city streets. For a long while, it was widely assumed that they merely had shitty (pun not entirely intended) digestion…until he’d suffered the great misfortune of witnessing one of the monsters fall to its knees and proceed to hack and sputter like a cat with a hairball until its lunch deigned the time proper to make a slightly-more-compact reappearance. Because he was such a sharing, kind individual (and maybe possibly slightly a bit because he loved seeing her excited more than he cared about his future sense of self-preservation), he had recounted the experience in alarming detail thrice over until she was satisfied that she’d captured a proper description in her note files. (In at least one instance, he’d been convinced to mimic the damned thing, which had left his knees grass-stained and his dignity in shreds, but he had slept comfortably and warm on her bosom that night so it was clearly worth it.)

And now he’s here to help her prove it. Now that she’s managed to convince Erwin to let her bring two of the big bastards home with her, hearsay and deductions are no longer good enough. Any conclusions previously drawn about titan anatomy from their excrement (or lack thereof) must now be poked, prodded and verified – with a stick, apparently – while suspended from a specially erected brace.

_At least the damned thing is focused on him, with his stick and blades at the ready._

“I think this line of sight is good enough, don’t you?” he asks pointedly. The troops have done a mercifully thorough job of immobilizing the beast with yokes and stakes driven through its limbs where muscles ought to be (this too, he assumes, will be the subject of future dissections – ones that she will more than likely have to recruit legion members more delicate with their blades than the hack and slash she normally managed) but it’s still managed to crane its head around nearly 180 degrees to stare at him as he aims a tree branch at its posterior.

_When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you._

This is the worst possible time for philosophy.

“Come on Levi, give him hell!” She claps her hands excitedly.

_Fuck you, for being stupidly motivating,_ he thinks with all of his might. He needs to get a decent swing going if he wants to do more than brush this thing’s buttcheeks with the dead leaves clinging to the edge of his branch, so he shifts and sways, sways and shifts. He gets a decent run going at the thing – good momentum, direct angle – and jabs forward with the stick, mushing one of the massive cheeks to the side and-

A scream pierces the air, though not an organic, guttural roar like he’s expecting. This shriek is distinctly metallic in nature and accented by loud, staccato pops and snaps as it drags on. Levi drops the stick, but it’s already too late – the yoke holding the titan’s head in place has snapped and the best has reared up to face him, eyes wide and teeth gleaming. The yoke's weight is apparently nothing to it – it swings its neck closer to him with ease and uses the inertia to wrench one of its arms free behind it. 

He curses under his breath and releases one of his hooks to re-aim higher up the building, swinging perilously close to the thing’s teeth as he does. His hook lands in the stone wall across the way and he’s able to pull himself up behind its head. Finding the sweet spot in its neck is going to be difficult with the yoke still intact, but definitely not impossible. He slams his hilt into the sheath and pulls a fresh blade free with one hand and rips his second hook free with his other. If he can shoot this second hook a few meters higher than the first, he should be able to get enough height to give himself a good spin on the way down and hopefully take this thing out with one hit. His hook flies free, arching up, up-

A thick curtain of steam rises up from below, blinding him and scalding his lungs. He’s almost positive he can hear someone screaming “Stay where you are!” but it’s not immediately clear if they’re shouting at him or any number of the troops on the ground. Whichever it is, he’s not listening; if he stays here much longer his skin will blister and blood will boil. He trusts that his second hook has landed and smacks the switch to reel him toward it. He breaks through the steam cloud easily, but the shouting only seems to intensify as he soars upward toward the wall. 

“Levi! Don’t you dare kill him! Look at me! OI! I swear to god I will never forgive you!”

He slams the brakes on his cable reel just before his knees smash into the wall and holds himself there, scowling, snarling down at the scene below. The steam is subsiding, though pockets of it still obscure a large portion of the thing’s head and torso. Most of the steam appears to be coming from one massive arm that is…lying a good twenty yards from the rest of the body. Levi does a double take, but sure enough, that’s where it is. He holds his cables tight as the steam continues to clear, revealing a tightly strung web of ropes that stretch from box cannons at the corners of the courtyard and pierce into the titan’s flesh, holding it in place. It’s screaming and wailing, pulling with all its might, but the ropes hold fast and the first wave of ground troops moves in to pull the yoke back into place and re-drive the stakes that have worked themselves free. 

And there she is, standing at the forefront of it all shouting orders. She’s as calm and collected as ever – as if the titan bearing down on her was nothing more than a yapping puppy.

“Put another one through its shoulders! Don’t let it gain another inch! Are you men or sobbing titty babies? _Pull!_ ”

_Maybe ever so slightly less than calm, then._ But more than competent, and definitely in control of the situation. Just as he knew she would be, and yet-

He sucks in a deep breath and waits for his guts to uncoil themselves from the knot they’ve twisted. He’ll wait here for now, until she calls him back to the ground.

* * *

“He didn’t have an asshole,” she tells him later, after the mess in the courtyard has been cleared and they’ve retired back to his quarters to clean themselves. She’s lying sprawled across his bed, bunching up all his blankets and dripping bathwater over everything. “We got a good view as we were nailing him back to the ground.”

“Did you expect it to?” he raises an eyebrow at her and tosses his towel to the floor.

“Not really,” she frowns, “But it’s good to know for sure.” She rolls onto her back and stares at him as he pulls a clean pajama shirt over his head. “Thank you for all your help.”

“Tche,” he scoffs, “Didn’t help enough.” He drags on a pair of shorts and crawls onto the bed beside her. His nose wrinkles at the site of the large, wet splotches she left all over his quilt, so he does the only sane thing and yanks the comb from his night stand and slithers up and over to sit on the small of her back.

“Of course you did,” she says. “What are you doing?”

He wrestles a chunk of her hair free to pull the comb through. “Nothing,” he insists, “Hold still.”

“Speaking of holding still,” she mumbles, dropping her face into the blankets, “You damned near took Sawney’s head off today.”

“Do you have to give them names?” he groans, completely ignoring the larger matter at hand in favor of detangling another bit of her hair.

“I do,” she says, lifting her head up just enough to smack against his fingers and make the hair he’s trying to comb go slack, “How am I supposed to talk to them if I have nothing to address them by?”

“Don’t talk to them!” Levi snorts, “They’re not pets. They’re mindless eating machines and they’re not gonna hesitate to take your shitty four-eyed head right off if you get too close.”

“Ah, there it is,” she says, pulling her hair away from him and rolling her hips to knock him off his perch. He slides off to one side and waits for her to roll over to face him. She doesn’t, however, and he’s left kicking at her thighs as she stares angrily at the mattress.

“Oi,” he pokes his toes into her, “What’s wrong?”

“You don’t,” she says, finally rolling over and clamping a leg up and over his to hold them in place, “You don’t trust me. Humanity’s Strongest Soldier has crawled so far up his own ass that he doesn’t trust his comrades anymore.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Levi balks. He has no fucking clue what she’s on about here – of _course_ he trusts her! He trusts her more than any of their other colleagues, in fact – more so than almost everyone he’s ever known. There’s no one else he would trust to do this work, and no one else that would even have the capacity to do it. So why is she staring at him like he’s just shut her down?

“I saw the look on your face this afternoon,” she says, “You were terrified.”

“I fucking was not-”

“You fucking were too! I thought you were about to come down and take his head clean off!”

“I would have, too!” Levi grumbles back at her, “If you hadn’t been screaming and shouting at me.”

“Why would you think you had to do that?”

“Because it was going to bite your damned head off?”

“No, why would you think it was necessary? Of course it’s going to bite my head off, Levi! That’s what they do! But why do _you_ think I wouldn’t have a contingency plan in case it got loose?”

“I,” he closes his mouth, suddenly furious with himself. Of course she’s right. She’d even gone over the contingency plan with him that morning. But, like an idiot, he’d completely forgotten in the heat of the moment and very nearly destroyed one of her priceless research subjects. “Fuck.”

“Fuck,” she repeats, and coughs out a chuckle.

“It was-“ he starts to say, then reverses course, “I got worried.”

“You panicked.”

“Whatever you want to call it,” he pushes her smirking face into the mattress, “But that doesn’t mean I don’t trust you. There’s no one I trust more – I mean fuck! How many times have you saved my sorry ass? It just means…” he fades out, staring at the ceiling and searching for the words.

“You’re continuing to pay the price, even though it kills you bit by bit?” she asks.

“Yeah.” He pulls at her hair again. “Sorry.”

“Idiot,” she laughs, “You can’t be sorry for something you can’t control.”

“Hmph.”

“We should probably work on that a bit,” she says.

“That?”

“I don’t think either of us wants to do something stupid in the heat of the moment, you know? I don’t know that I could forgive…”

“Yeah,” he says simply, “I know.” He probably wouldn’t forgive himself either if he endangered a mission for her sake alone. Of course, the reverse is true as well, which lends a nice little morbid twist to the whole affair.

“Fuck,” she curses into the mattress, “Maybe I ought to go sleep in my own bed tonight.”

“Don’t,” he says seriously and grabs at her arm, “That’s not going to fix anything.” He knows she could push him away – to the borders of Wall Maria – and he’d still worry about that stupid head of hers getting bitten off. It’s just the way it is.

“You’re a pain in my ass, Levi.”

“You’re saying that to me?” he scoffs at her and kicks at her hip playfully, “We’re you the one going on about amazing brains and cognitive dissonance not two days ago?”

“No, what I said was that those were the trivial thoughts of small men-”

He whacks her with the pillow. “It’s always about size with you.”

* * *

He turns himself away from the window and stomps back to his desk. He’s no stranger to panic, alright, but he’s even less of a stranger to Erwin’s fits of temper when his paperwork isn’t completed accurately and on time. He pulls the chair back to the desk and flips the pile of papers back up to face him.

_Jacobs, Stein, Wolff, Parker, Lindt_

He taps the pen on the desk. The list of casualties is mercifully short for this report, but that doesn’t make scratching the names across the paper any less painful.

The screaming continues from outside. His heart climbs high into his throat, high enough that he’s convinced for a second he might puke it out all over his paperwork.

_Enough._

He swallows the lump back down, breathes in deeply as the shouting fades to laughter. (One person’s laughter amongst a sea of screaming, but laughter all the same.) He’s done his enough times to know that the lump in his throat and twisting in his gut mean he can write that much faster, stack the papers that much higher, and generally shift the direction of Erwin’s wrath away from himself and his shitty handwriting. 

The memories of the past few weeks cease their unwelcome intrusions into his thoughts and he is left here, facing down his desk, living only in the here and now.

He writes.


End file.
